The Money Bubble by James Turk and John Rubino

Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, my financial strategy was simply to plow the recommended income percentage into my 401k accounts, and into conventionally recommended mutual funds, then forget about it. Finance wasn't an area in which I had much interest.

The dot-com bust in the early years of this century did not bother me - stocks go up and down and the occasional sharp correction is to be expected. But the crisis of 2008 seemed to me to be different - and it was especially the response to it that disturbed me. This wasn't merely a correction in the stock market. We were told that the international financial system was on the verge of collapse and only massive monetary intervention by the government could prevent a catastrophe.

I was stunned by this declaration. Banks have the reputation of being conservative and stodgy institutions. How did these great international banks get into the position of having their books so unbalanced that they were dangerously vulnerable to a downturn in the real estate market? The people running these institutions were either not as clever as I thought or not as responsible as I thought, or both.

Common sense said that the banks got into so much trouble because they were "overleveraged" - a term I later learned meaning that they themselves had borrowed too much money and speculated with it, much of it in real estate market, which is why the bust in real estate put them in so much trouble. Our national answer was to bail out the banks with hundreds of billions of dollars - itself borrowed money. All we did was "solve" the banks' debt problems by transferring it to the national debt.

That might have been OK if we had acknowledged that it only actually solved anything to the extent that we got our national debt under control. But while the bank bailout solved the immediate financial crisis, the stock and real estate bust had resulted in an economic recession as well. Our response to that recession was even more stunning than the declaration of the catastrophic condition of international finance. The near fatal collapse of the banks should have been a wakeup call to the danger of too much debt: But instead of that crisis chastening us in our profligate ways, our answer to the recession was a massive increase of government debt and the spending of borrowed money!

This combination of events thoroughly convinced me that the idea that the people in charge basically know what they are doing is dangerously naïve. And so is the idea that you can more or less chuck your retirement savings into a reputable mutual fund, forget about it, and be confident that it will be there for you when you retire. I no longer believed any of the conventional wisdom about financial planning and realized I'd have to rapidly educate myself on matters financial or risk being disillusioned when I eventually retired.

I won't rehearse all that education, but The Money Bubble has certainly been part of it and I've read the book as well as listened to it several times while running. The authors elaborate some fundamental matters that everyone in the current situation really must know, like the true nature of money, the historical role of gold in international finance, and the relationship between inflation and government debt. They flesh out the common sense that should have woken us up in 2008 - that you can't solve a debt problem by more debt. Most importantly, they discuss how to prepare yourself for the inevitable financial crisis that has only been postponed, not avoided.